Measuring Entrainment in Spontaneous Code-switched Speech

Debasmita Bhattacharya, Siying Ding, Alayna Nguyen, Julia Hirschberg


Abstract
It is well-known that speakers who entrain to one another have more successful conversations than those who do not. Previous research has shown that interlocutors entrain on linguistic features in both written and spoken monolingual domains. More recent work on code-switched communication has also shown preliminary evidence of entrainment on certain aspects of code-switching (CSW). However, such studies of entrainment in code-switched domains have been extremely few and restricted to human-machine textual interactions. Our work studies code-switched spontaneous speech between humans, finding that (1) patterns of written and spoken entrainment in monolingual settings largely generalize to code-switched settings, and (2) some patterns of entrainment on code-switching in dialogue agent-generated text generalize to spontaneous code-switched speech. Our findings give rise to important implications for the potentially “universal” nature of entrainment as a communication phenomenon, and potential applications in inclusive and interactive speech technology.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.158
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2865–2876
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.158
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Debasmita Bhattacharya, Siying Ding, Alayna Nguyen, and Julia Hirschberg. 2024. Measuring Entrainment in Spontaneous Code-switched Speech. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2865–2876, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Measuring Entrainment in Spontaneous Code-switched Speech (Bhattacharya et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.158.pdf
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 2024.naacl-long.158.copyright.pdf